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DECEMBER, 1877.]
THE INDIKA OF MEGASTHENÊS.
339
these keeps under arms 50,000 foot-soldiers, 4000+ cavalry, and 400 elephants. Next come the Andar , a still more powerful race, which possesses numerous villages, and thirty towns de- fended by walls and towers, and which supplies its king with an army of 100,000 infantry, 2000 cavalry, and 1000 elephants. Gold is very abundant among the Dardæ, and silver among the Setæ.
But the Prasii surpass in power and glory
every other people, not only in this quarter, but one may say in all India, their capital being Palibothra, a very large and wealthy city, after which some call the people itself the Palibothri,-nay, even the whole tract along the Ganges. Their king has in his pay a standing army of 600,000 foot-soldiers, 30,000 cavalry, and 9000 elephants : whence may be formed some conjecture as to the vastness of his resources.
After these, but more inland, are the Monedes
FRAGM. LVI. B.
follow war, and others trade. The noblest and Solin. 52. 6-17.
richest manage public affairs, administer justice, Catalogue of Indian Races.
and sit in council with the kings. There exists "The greatest rivers of India are the Ganges also a fifth class, consisting of those most eminent and Indus, and of these some assert that the for their wisdom, who, when sated with life, seek Ganges rises from uncertain sources and inundates death by mounting a burning funeral pile. Those, the country in the manner of the Nile, while others however, who have become the devotees ot a sterner
incline to think that it rises in the Scythian moun. sect, and pass their life in the woods, hunt ele• tains. [The Hypa nis is also there, a very noble 1 phants, which, when made quite tame and docile,
river, which formed the limit of Alexander's they use for ploughing and for riding on. march, as the altars erected on its bankes prove.] In the Ganges there is an island extremely poThe least breadth of the Ganges is eight miles, and pulous, occupied by a very powerful nation whose its greatest twenty. Its depth where it is shallow- king keeps under arms 50,000 foot and 4000 horse. est is fully a hundred feet. The people who live In fact no one invested with kingly power ever in the furthest-off part are the Gangarides, keeps on foot a military force without a very great whose king possesses 1000 horse, 700 elephants, number of elephants and foot and cavalry. and 60,000 foot in apparatus of war.
The Prasian nation, which is extremely powerOf the Indians some cultivate the soil, very many fal, inhabits a city called Pali bôtra, whence Aitariya Brahmana along with other non-Aryan tribes + IV.M.-v. 1. III. M. which occupied the country north of the Ganges at the I The Andare are readily identified with the Andhra of time when the Brahmans established thuir first settlements
Sanskrit a great and powerful nation settled originally in in the country. The Molinde are mentioned as the Malada in
the Dekhan between the middle part of the courses of the the Puránio Lista, but no further trace of them is met with.
God&vart and the Krishn rivers, but which, before the The Ubere must be referred to the Bars, a numerous
time of Megasthenes, had spread their way towards the race spread over the central districts of the region spoken
north as far as the upper course of the Narmada (Ner. of, and extending as far as to Assam. The name is pro- budda). and, as has been already indicated, the lower nounced differently in different districts, and variously districts of the Gangetic basin. Vide vol. V. p. 176. For written, a Bors or Bhors, Bhowris, Barriias and Bb&rhiyas, a notice of Andhra (the modern Telingana) se General Bareyas, Baoris, Bharnis, &c. The race, though formerly
Cunningham's Anc. Geog. of Ind. pp. 527-536. powerful, is now one of the lowest classes of the population. Tbe Pascale are identified as the inhabitants of Panchåla,
Pliny here reverta to where he started from in his which, as already stated, was the old name of the Dolb.
enumeration of the tribes. The Seta are the Sata or The Colube respond to the Kbuluta or Kolata-men
Sátaka of Sanskrit geography, which locates them in the tioned in the 4th book of the Ramayan, in the enumera
neighbourhood of the Daradas. (According to Yule, howtion of the races of the west, also in the Vardha Sanhita
ever, they are the Sansksit Sekas, and he places them in the list of the people of the north-west, and in the
on the Bangs about Jhajpur, south-eat from Ajmir.Indian drama called the Mudra Rakshasa, of which the
ED.) hero in the well-known Chandragupta. They were set- See Arrian's Anab. V.29, where we read that Alexander Med not far from the Upper Jamná. About the middle having arranged his troops in separate divisions ordered of the 7th century they were visited by the famous Chinese them to build on the banks of the Hyphasis twelve altars to traveller Hiwen- Thsang, who writes their name as Kid- be of equal height with the loftiest towers, while exceed lu-to. Yule places the Passale in the south-west of ing them in breadth. From Curtius we learn that they Tirhurom, and the Kolube on the Kondochates (Gandaki) were formed of square blocks of stone. There has in the north-east of Gorakhpur and north-west of Saran. been much controversy regarding their site, but it must The Abali answer perhaps to the Gvallas or Halvais have been near the capital of Sopithes, whose name of South Bahar and of the hills which covered the Lassen has identified with the Sanskrit Agrapati, 'lord of southern parts of the ancient Mapudba. The Talacte horses. These Asvapati were a line of princes whose terriare the people of the kingdom of Tâmralista mentioned tory, according to the 12th book of the Ramdyana, lay on in the Mahabharata. In the writings of the Buddhista of the right or north bank of the Vipsa (Hyphasis or Bile), Ceylon the name appeare . Tamalitti, corresponding to in the mountainous part of the Dosb comprised between the Tamluk of the present day. Between these two forms that river and the Upper Iravati. Their capital is called of the name that given by Pliny is evidently tbe connect in the poem of V Almiki Rajagriha, which still existe under ing link. Tumluk lies to the south-west of Calcutta, from the name of Rbjagiri. At some distance from this there which it is distant in a direct line about 35 miles. It was is a chain of heights called Sekandar-giri, or Alexan. in old times the main emporium of the trade carried on der's mountain.'- See St. Martin's Etude, &c. Pp. 108. between Gangetic India and Ceylon.
111.
